Commodities, such as gas, water, electricity, or other forms of power, energy, or desirable commodity are delivered from a supplier to consumers. The costs associated with acquiring, generating, developing and/or delivering the commodity is borne by the consumer, often by paying for the volume or amount of the commodity. For example, if natural gas is delivered to a business or household through a pipe system using metering at the consumer's location, a gas meter measures the flow-rate of the gas entering the business or household. The flow-rate determines the amount of the commodity consumed over a given time period, and the consumer is billed regularly to pay for the commodity.
Historically, gas meters were equipped with a readout dial to enable a utility employee to record gas usage for billing purposes. In order read the meter, the employee would have to look directly at the meter to read the dial. This process would be repeated at each home or business, a time-consuming task. The meters require resources to manufacture and/or install, and need to be repaired or replaced after failure.
In recent years, encoder receiver transmitters have been developed to transmit a signal related to the gas usage to a remote receiver. The utility employee simply drives past the building in a vehicle and receive the transmitted usage data without ever leaving the vehicle. U.S. Pat. No. 5,673,252 to Johnson et al., hereby incorporated herein by reference, describes a communications protocol for transmitting usage data from a gas meter. Meters that are read from a distance are more complex and expensive than simple flow meters, and require data transmission capabilities and other components that also require repair and maintenance.
For reasons stated above, and for other reasons which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading the present specification, there is a need for systems and methods that provide for the determination and monitoring of a commodity delivered from a common source to multiple consumers. There is a particular need for determining consumption of a commodity while reducing the costs and complexity of metering of the commodity. The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and addresses deficiencies in known systems and techniques.